Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on The Entertaining Minutiae of this Week

A few tidbits that entertained me over the past few days…

Went to Google the song “Punching in a Dream” by Naked and Famous. When you ask Siri to search for it for you, she just hears “Google naked and famous punching in a dream” –luckily, she pulled up what we were initially searching for.

In that same vein, I was once told I needed to see a weird movie poster for the Yogi Bear movie a few years back – it had the slogan “Everything’s coming in bears” and it was apparently…weird. The person telling me about it had a hard time describing it, so she went “Just do a Google image search for ‘Coming in bears,'” which I decided I was better off not doing.

Some time later, I told my friend that story, and he decided to do the Google image search for me. It was definitely an eye-opener…though I imagine the search would have produced different results had he spelled “coming” with an “o.”

I never did get around to seeing that poster…

What else was entertaining…I learned how to properly pronounce “gauze.” It all started when my husband was really confused as to why I bought him a bunch of gays, and why I put the gays on the bathroom counter (I mean, hospitality first, we should have been offering them food).

Then I found out two days later that I’ve been pronouncing “reprise” incorrectly my entire life.

I started to take a class in Qi Gong/Tai Chi yesterday. I’m feeling pretty good about it, since my frustration over everything in life is reaching Lewis Black proportions, so I could stand to chill the fuck out for a bit.

I also imagine there’ll be jokes coming out of this. I can’t imagine otherwise, considering I performed a move yesterday called “Fluffing the Pillow.”

I’ve run into a lot of unsolicited feedback from people about my material throughout the years. Some comments are more useful than others, but nothing is as useless as “It’s great!” or “It’s terrible!” (even though the former is, at the very least, gratifying).

Comedy is subjective. End of story. “It’s great/terrible!” means it’s great/terrible to YOU, and since you are an individual snowflake, your opinion on what’s funny is based on your own personal taste and life experiences.

And yet it kind of boggles me that people will make choices on what to watch or eat, or where to go, or anything, based on whether someone else likes/dislikes it, without any further elaboration. True, people have similar enough tastes that if your best friend likes something, there’s a pretty good chance you will too.

I guess the most obnoxious display of this is online – Amazon ratings without comments to support them, YouTube likes/dislikes without comments, even Facebook-likes to a degree (though not so much there, since many Facebook posts are more declarations of opinions than it is work that you’re putting on display).

I think with the former two, the anonymity of your opinion gives you more freedom to talk about what sucks without repercussion. For instance, with Amazon, I heard that there are authors that will confront people that make negative comments on the books they’re selling…provided that’s true, I can see where it could be beneficial to not leave your name attributed to your opinion. But when someone looks up your name on YouTube and dislikes every video you created rapid-fire without even watching them (which, based on what I could best gather from my analytics report, happened to me a few years ago), that’s just someone letting off personal steam against you, probably while playing Alanis Morrisette’s “You Oughta Know” on loop, that can contribute (however mildly) to a bad online reputation.

Nevertheless, your one-star or dislike is as useful to the creator and the consumers as not leaving any feedback at all. To your friends, your opinion might be useful, but to a world wide web of strangers, who the hell are you?

The adage “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” might apply best here – because honestly, an item that was posted 2 years ago with no feedback/comments gives a similarly poor message.

One of the first reactions that people have when I tell them I’m a comedian (right after blurting “Tell me a joke!”) is that they ask me who my favorite comedians are – who I listen to, who my inspiration is. Often the answer they expect is a contemporary stand-up, so I give them what they’re asking for. After all, it’s no lie that I’ve been influenced by Lewis Black, Louis C.K., and any other guys with some form of that name.

The thing is, the folks who sold the idea of “being funny” to me in the first place weren’t stand-ups, and they weren’t from the era I grew up in. When I was a child, Sunday afternoons consisted of my mother playing a marathon from her collection of Abbott and Costello movies. We listened to Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s “The 2000 Year Old Man” on long car rides (and some short car rides). Eventually, when I was old enough to get into Saturday Night Live, I became way more interested in the episodes from the ‘70’s, and fell in a tender platonic love with Gilda Radner.

I found my way down an Internet rabbit hole of all these things earlier, and found a treasure trove of old Abbott and Costello movies, including many of the ones that are in my mom’s collection (she was mostly interested in their mysteries/spooky ones, though a few exceptions had also popped up on the shelf over time).

Hey all! I went on a little bit of a blog-hiatus. Took longer than I expected. But now I’m back!

I’ll update you with the “why” as soon as I finish letting the ink dry on everything, but let’s just say that since around August/September, I went through nearly every change that signifies true adulthood (minus the having children part. Because no.). Things have at least quieted down now to the point that I can get back to comedy, blogging and the like.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Robin Williams…What Can I Say

All right, this one’s gonna be a little hard…Robin Williams is the first celebrity whose death I actually cried over.

The weirdest thing, is that I was just earlier thinking back to a conversation I had several years ago. I was telling someone about how the comedy community can be a worrisome place sometimes; honestly, if you woke up one morning and found out that virtually any comic you know – pick any one – passed away, you wouldn’t be completely shocked (even the ones who are mostly emotionally stable…after all, this is a career that can involve exhausting schedules and long car rides too).

He related, to an extent, as he’s a motorsports enthusiast who does his own racing – so the idea of anyone dying at any time wasn’t unfamiliar to him, because, look what they put themselves through every time they step foot (wheel?) onto a track. While that’s certainly a valid point, something seemed off about the comparison.

Some time later, I noticed that the difference here is that, when a driver is in that racecar, that time spent in the car is the only time others spend on high-alert for the person. When a comic’s on a stage, that’s pretty much the only time I’m NOT on high-alert for the person.

That conversation started reeling back to me Sunday night – right after I read the news about the Tony Stewart/Kevin Ward, Jr. debacle – and then I got the news about Robin Williams not 24 hours later and that conversation hit a full circle in my world. It’s the perfect example of everything I was pretty sure I knew.

So there’s that oddly coincidental anecdote, but really there’s so much more to this that I – and dareisay, we the comedy community – find so extremely discomforting about Williams’ passing.

First off is the idea that many, many, many of us have been to a dark place. Some have been closer to the edge than others, but most of us have at least made it out to the proverbial cliff – if only to just park the car and take a look around from inside it (I swear my jokes are better than my analogies). And to know that someone – who most of us see as probably a more brilliant, talented figure than we may ever become, and who most of us respect immensely – made it to a darker place that any of us have ever come to understand…is incomprehensible. It’s sickening. It’s taking my worst moment in life and multiplying it by at least 20, and…holy shit. That’s the kind of torture that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and here it is happening to someone who had a few promising decades ahead of him to continue bringing his brand of happiness to the world.

Now, while it’s true that mental health issues are obviously not exclusive to comedians, here’s the thing that sticks it in and snaps it off for me: people were genuinely surprised about the news.

One of the perceptions about comedians that severely irks me is this notion that we’re always making you happy, therefore we’re always happy. House burns down and half your family dies? No bother for the comedian – that’s gonna be GREAT material one day! I even overheard someone who once hurt me, very deeply, rationalize his guilt for doing so by going “Well she’ll be fine…she’ll write a few jokes about it and move on.”

In my experience – and trust me, I know I’ve got a lot to learn, so don’t consider this the exhaustive list – a lot of stand-up material comes from one of two places. Much of it is a coping mechanism against the very things that have haunted the comic – think jokes about illness, divorce, death of loved ones, addiction.

Now you may think, “Well that comic I saw last year told a lot of jokes about his pet ferret – that can’t be causing him so much grief, can it?” Good thinking, that brings me to my second point. In many cases, it’s hard to come up with jokes about the deep stuff in your life. It could be because you’re still in the middle of dealing with it – or take my case, where I refrained for years from talking on stage about my dad’s passing, simply out of fear of looking like a charity case in the event the jokes failed. The nice thing about comedy is that you can find it in both the heavy and light stuff in life alike – so if you really don’t wanna shoot for the therapy-session-style bits, you can distract yourself from what you’re going through for a little bit, by finding humor in the lighter stuff and using it. If you’re funny, you’re funny – it won’t matter much which route you take.

So at any rate, no, we’re not “happy all the time.” Just like we’re not sad all the time either…we’re human beings, we are who we are when we are, just like everyone else. But some of us are just on the fragile side, which is why we’re here.

I figured I’d keep on writing in hopes of reaching some bright sunshiny ending, much like I (like to think I) did when we lost Otto, but I don’t think I’m going to get to one this time. One of the best things we can do, as a community of comedians, is to just continue keeping laughter alive…it may not help everyone, and certainly no one can be helped by laughter alone, but it’s what we can do well…and you know it’s still helping a few people in their dark moments to keep hanging in there. We gotta keep it going.

Rest in peace, Robin Williams. Thank you for sharing your gifts with us – may you now find the gift of your own peace that you couldn’t find on this planet.

My newsfeed essentially blew up this morning with the most disheartening news. Otto Petersen, of the famed “Otto and George” duo, passed away unexpectedly. For those of you unfamiliar, watch and behold:

To explain the rest of this post, suffice it to say I’m inarguably pan-optimistic; even the worst day of my life had some pretty good moments to it. If you’re one of those bitter, cynical people who hears the word “optimism” and goes “ahhh stupid self-help sunshine touchy-feely hippie rainbow dumbass,” kindly stop reading this and go impale yourself, preferably on something infected with herpes. You probably figured you’d had it coming, anyway.

And now I begin!

That news this morning hit me right in the gut. Almost inexplicably hard, considering I’ve only met him a handful of times personally, but the impact he has had on me and so many of my friends and mentors could be written about in volumes.

As the day progressed, I kept checking Facebook in some vain hope someone would go “April Fools! two weeks late lolz” – but the shout-outs, the memorials, the videos, and the photos all kept coming. It was amazing to see, well exactly how many comedians I’m friends with on Facebook for starters, but also how many people he touched, and how many people are busting out of the woodwork to give back – if only to preserve a memory. It started to get me thinking a lot about this community I chose to join.

(Now mind you, this is what I call my “optimism MO”…I’m not always good at looking on the bright side of a shitty situation, but I’m an ace at using that situation to focus on something marginally related but positive.)

At first I thought, “Well of course everyone wants to post about Otto NOW…” – but, that’s not necessarily the case. Yes, we’ll reach out to remember someone who has passed in the community, sometimes whether we know them personally or not (I mean, who really cared if you met George Carlin personally? All we had to know was, when he died, we lost one of our Grand Patriarchs and it was a day of mourning).

But we also reach out for members who are struggling: think of the number of benefit shows we held nationwide when we heard one of the Aurora shooting victims was a comedian.

We reach out to congratulate our colleagues when they accomplish something big: how many times have you seen people sharing a post to tune in to watch a friend on TV tonight, or congratulating them on making it into a festival or winning a competition? (NOT ENOUGH TIMES is the answer, but that’s not a fault from lack of sharing)

We reach out to promote ourselves (obviously), but also to promote others. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been tagged in 5 photos in under 2 hours, and all 5 are the same friggin show poster. And not all the taggers are necessarily people involved with the show, either.

And when that show goes well, we thank everyonewho put the show together and everyone who we had the pleasure to work alongside. Even if that show didn’t go well at all.

I joined a community of supportive, creative, empathetic and truly beautiful people.

In this industry, very few people are slated to “make it big,” and yet, most of us don’t cut each other’s throats to get to the top (yes there are assholes in this business, but there are assholes who work at McDonald’s too. Where would you rather be?). We encourage each other, we share leads, we offer criticisms and affirmations and suggestions. Sometimes we collaborate, and make bigger projects.

In this industry, many of the more seasoned comics are happy to take some future prodigies under their wing – so long as they get that you’re serious and if they think that, good or bad now, you have some potential. One veteran comic, that I’d seen at a few local open mics, spent over an hour on the phone with me one night (and who the hell am I?), while I hashed out some material I was working on and he imparted his philosophies on joke writing, and how they applied to what I was trying to do. And I’ll be damned, my writing has changed, gradually but dramatically, for the better, since that night.

In this industry, the worst shit you go through in life can lead you to the best successes you’ll ever achieve. There is no feeling in the world like getting off the stage and knocking back a beer with one of your comedy buddies, thinking “man, that was some hard work.” And those ten minutes you’d just spent telling jokes about dicks and toasters and whatever, only accounts for about 2% of that work.

Piggybacking off that last point, in this industry you can drink on the job.

And these are things that most of us seem to get. Like any artist, we’re here for the craft, and, while we’re all trying to get that spot on “Late Night With Stephen Colbert,” we’ll still work together to make sure that somebody, somewhere, somehow, is laughing at something. And the empathy and vulnerability we’ve developed along the way, in hopes of developing the perfect schtick or dealing with audience members or “finding our voice” (betcha never heard that term before), has helped us also to better understand, and form an almost immediate bond with, the rest of the members of our comedy family. And sometimes even call them a family.

Yes, all this thinking was spawned from an untimely death.

I wish it didn’t have to take Otto’s passing for me to drum all this up (I mean, come on God, Justin Bieber is RIGHT THERE), but I had to change my focus to keep my brain from eating itself while intermittently shouting “PUSSAY!” in memorium. And seeing how this community comes together, in all types of situations, gave me some comfort today in knowing that we are all doing something very right.

Rest in peace, Otto. And thanks for causing me to slip into this little rabbithole of thought.

So, in case it’s not obvious, I have a difficult time disciplining myself to update my blog regularly.

I read the “Super Easy Ways to Make a Blog Post Happen Every Day” type articles, all suggesting different things that you can do in a pinch – Post a photo! (done that) Link to a video! (done that) Promote a friend! (did that via posting the video) Write a haiku! (I do that without thinking, but you may still see such a post in the future because I might have a haiku problem)

I try them all at one point or another, because I’m open to new ideas and I’m somewhat industrious. One I’ve been putting off though, is “Write a Top 10 List!” because I can’t think one up. But I should do it, because you LOVE top 10 lists. I LOVE top 10 lists. Everyone you know LOVES top 10 lists. Or top ANYTHING lists. If it’s numbered – shit, even if it’s just bullet-pointed and the key points are in bold – we will EAT THAT SHIT UP.

So I guess I owe it to you all then, huh?

In an effort to compensate for my lack of numbered things in the past, I’ll even give it to you tenfold.

Here’s a Top 10 List of Top 10 Lists I Found on the Internet:

10. Budapest Top 10While this one’s a little bit niche, it sat well with me because A) I’ve been to Budapest, LOVED it, want to go back, and would recommend the city to all; and B) There’s 11 Budapest-themed Top 10 lists on this one page. So consider this me giving it to you twentyfold.

The writer of this list appears to have no respect whatsoever for any of the foods on this list (and really you can’t blame him/her all that much), and as a result the read is, be it intentional or not, entertaining for its melodrama. A lot of the choices here are obvious though (except bacon-everything was mysteriously left off), so while I was on Endless Simmer’s website still, I found this next more educational one for my American (read: probably all of my) fans…

7. The Top 10 Foods Only Australia Could Have InventedNow this one I found a little more educational. Apparently written in response to the America post due to many complaints about how the author is clearly unamerican and how America’s not fat, it’s big-boned, la de dah. But I definitely haven’t heard of (and might be willing to try) a number of these items. Really I’m pretty sure the only thing I’m familiar with is Vegemite, and that’s only because we all know the Men at Work song.

6. AFI’s Top 10 Romantic ComediesThis being a comedian’s website, I should give a nod to something that brings in the lulz. And seriously, I used to take the AFI countdowns in like they were religious doctrine. I still would, if I had the focus to sit down in front of a TV ever.

4. Top 10 Obscure Inventions that Killed Their InventorsIt’s like I always say, I don’t mind if good- or bad fortune happens to me, as long as it makes for an excellent story I can tell later. I guess that doesn’t fully relate to these people because they were too dead to tell their story later. But still, a story’s a story – respect to them for taking one for the team. And, you know, for inventing things, making the world a better place, blah blah blah.

2. 10 Ancient Legends About DreamsSo this isn’t a Top 10 list, rather a list of ten things. But my list isn’t really a Top 10 list either, it’s just disguised as one to make you think I rank things, so ssshhh…plus, this one’s probably got some of the coolest information of all these lists.

1. The Top 10 Top 10 Lists of 2013Because while I was searching about online for the best Top 10 lists, it appears the NY Times beat me to it. So now you have it twenty-nine-fold…unless they direct you to another Top 10 Top 10 lists, which is suspense I’m comfortable keeping you in.

This took me way too freaking long to write. Next time I’ll just stick with “Top 10 green-colored foods,” or something. Enjoy the rabbit holes you’re all about to get lost in! Sorry for ending so many sentences with prepositions!

The second show (not advertised on my calendar…A BLOG EXCLUSIVE) is at McLynn’s, on 250 Morris Ave. in Springfield. That show starts at 9PM, and always features a grab bag of comics from all experience levels. Mostly planned, some surprises along the way. The show lineup is rather comparable to pregnancies in that respect.

Both shows are FREE ENTRY, and the McLynn’s show generally doesn’t start until all the comics and groupies from Crossroads make it over (the producers know how this thing works).

So if you’re in the area (or even if you’re not!) and looking for something to do, well now you have two things to do. Swing on by!

text1: When are you coming home for winter break?
text2: You can say Christmas break. You’re among friends here.
text1: Indeed, but the break includes more than just Christmas. New Year’s is also celebrated during that time, as is, for some, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
text2: Martin Luther Who Day? He doesn’t count.
text1: …you’re excluding him because he’s black, aren’t you?

text1: what I said makes perfect sense.
text2: I’ll look it over in the morning
text1: you’ll look it over i the morning. do you save these or something? stalker.
text2: It’s saved IN MY MIND
text1: well if that isn’t the creepiest

“‘Walk this Way’ was done originally by Aerosmith themselves, it wasn’t until later when they re-did it with DMX.”
“DMX…really?”
“DMC, my bad. Wow that was a horrible mix-up.”
“DMX, isn’t that a kind of bike?”

text1: so, sleep tight…good night.
text1: let the bed bugs bite.

text1: Another solid quote from my xanga…
text1: “People that drive around in parking lots are stupid.”

text1: I just threatened to light someone’s vagina on fire
text2: I love you more than pancakes

“Got a problem with that? Wanna take this outside and fart about it?”

text1: Ha! Then I guess you learned a lesson about ever expecting better from me!
text1: Or really ever expecting anything at all from me.
text1: Oh God I’m such a disappointment.
text2: You’re just like Christmas.